According to estimates, about 1.5 million Indonesians currently work in the Kingdom. Even though any restriction on Indonesian workers would hurt Saudi recruitment offices, it did not stop 98 percent of owners favoring of a total ban at the chamber, Riyadh daily reported.
The result of the vote is believed to be legally binding.
Head of the Riyadh chamber’s National Committee for Recruitment Saad Al-Baddah said recruitment offices claimed their counterparts in Indonesia were demanding commission and wages that were too high.
Al-Baddah said that more than 40 investors and recruitment office owners gathered to discuss the situation with Indonesian representatives, but to no avail.
Al-Baddah said his committee would start urging newspapers to stop advertising for labor from the Southeast Asian country.
Recruitment offices were also urged to explore other alternatives in countries like Vietnam, Thailand and Cambodia.
It was claimed that the cost of recruiting labor from Indonesia had risen 300 percent from SR2,800 to SR7,500 over the past three years.
Recruitment firms have already rejected the latest SR375 increase ordered by the Indonesian government in April. They claim the total cost for hiring an Indonesian maid is at least SR9,000.
Saudi firms also accuse their Indonesian counterparts of failing to fulfill most of their commitments, including the provision of one month of training and orientation for maids coming to the Kingdom. They say that this exacerbates the problem of runaway maids.
In a previous interview published in Arab News, Jamal Al-Mofavaz, a Saudi investor in the recruitment market, said that the number of Indonesian domestic workers in the Kingdom fluctuates between 1.2 and 1.5 million.
“Saudi families spend more than SR20 billion on these workers a year. However, they also incur losses to the tune of 30 percent of this amount due to the failure of housemaids to fulfill the provisions of labor contracts,” he said, attributing this mainly to the absence of effective regulations protecting the rights of Saudi families.
According to Al-Mofavaz, Saudi citizens are forced to pay at least SR2,500 to Indonesian recruitment offices and their respective agents to recruit a single domestic worker.
“This is unjustifiable and incomprehensible. The current relations between Saudi recruitment offices and their Indonesian counterparts are one-sided,” he said, while underlining the need to establish mutually balanced relations based on the principles of partnership and reciprocal respect.
He also noted that Saudi recruitment offices agreed nearly two years ago to increase the monthly wage of Indonesian maids from SR600 to SR800 after demands from Indonesia.
